Notch, Happiness and Wealth Inequality
Minecraft creator Notch (Markus Persson) became a multi-billionaire and seemingly achieved the ultimate success for any software developer. Yet he is really miserable.
I just watch a youtube video titled The Tragic Tale of Notch. If you got elementary school kids, or you are a young person yourself then it is hard to not know who Notch is. The famous creator of MineCraft. One of the most popular games ever.
He sold his share of Mojang, the company making MineCraft for $2.5 billion to Microsoft, got himself a massive mansion in LA and lived a life of huge parties. Living the dream right? Nope, not according to the video.
But this story is not about the misery of a lone billionaire, but the cost of inequality. A typical response to complaints about wealth and income inequality is that rather than splitting the pie into equal pieces, we should grow the size of the whole cake. In principle it doesn’t matter if the relative size of your pie piece is small as long as it has gotten large in absolute terms. A variant of this sentiment was expressed beautifully by Winston Churchill:
